Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang

[johnkarls]

Originally Posted by johnkarls » Mon Sep 08, 2025 3:49 pm – 161 views in Sec. 3 (Possible Topics for Future Meetings) before being transplanted here
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I propose that we read “Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future” by Dan Wang (WW Norton & Co 8/26/2025 - 234 pages sans notes & index - $31.99 + shipping or $14.99 Kindle from Amazon.com).


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Book Description per Amazon.com (usually from the book’s dust cover with a "New York Times Bestseller" banner headline added by Amazon)

Longlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award
An August 2025 Next Big Idea Club Must-Read Book

[Reading Liberally Editorial Note – The two foregoing “seals of approval” were added by Amazon.com instead of the de rigueur “New York Times Bestseller" because they are more prestigious BUT HAVE NO FEAR, “Breakneck” debuted at No. 4 on the NYT Non-Fiction Bestseller List for 9/14/2025.]

A riveting, firsthand investigation of China’s seismic progress, its human costs, and what it means for America.

For close to a decade, technology analyst Dan Wang―“a gifted observer of contemporary China” (Ross Douthat)―has been living through the country’s astonishing, messy progress. China’s towering bridges, gleaming railways, and sprawling factories have improved economic outcomes in record time. But rapid change has also sent ripples of pain throughout the society. This reality―political repression and astonishing growth―is not a paradox, but rather a feature of China’s engineering mindset.

In Breakneck, Wang blends political, economic, and philosophical analysis with reportage to reveal a provocative new framework for understanding China―one that helps us see America more clearly, too. While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, the United States has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad

Blending razor-sharp analysis with immersive storytelling, Wang offers a gripping portrait of a nation in flux. Breakneck traverses metropolises like Shanghai, Chongqing, and Shenzhen, where the engineering state has created not only dazzling infrastructure but also a sense of optimism. The book also exposes the downsides of social engineering, including the surveillance of ethnic minorities, political suppression, and the traumas of the one-child policy and zero-Covid.

In an era of animosity and mistrust, Wang unmasks the shocking similarities between the United States and China. Breakneck reveals how each country points toward a better path for the other: Chinese citizens would be better off if their government could learn to value individual liberties, while Americans would be better off if their government could learn to embrace engineering―and to produce better outcomes for the many, not just the few.


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Book Description From the Author

Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future is seven annual letters.

Fundamentally, it's driven by a few simple ideas. That Americans and Chinese are fundamentally alike: restless, eager for shortcuts, ultimately driving most of the world's big changes. That their rivalry should not be reasoned through with worn-out terms from the past century like socialist, democratic, or neoliberal. And that both countries are tangles of imperfection, regularly delivering — in the name of competition — self-beatings that go beyond the wildest dreams of the other.

The simplest idea I present is that China is an engineering state, which brings a sledgehammer to problems both physical and social, in contrast with America's lawyerly society, which brings a gavel to block almost everything, good and bad.

Breakneck begins with a bike ride I took from Guiyang to Chongqing in 2021. China's fourth-poorest province, I was delighted to find, has much better infrastructure than California or New York, both wealthier by orders of magnitude. Five days of grueling climbs on stunning green mountains gave me glimpses of what socialism with Chinese characteristics really looks like. But there is more to the engineering state than tall bridges. The heart of the book concerns how badly Beijing goes off track when it engages in social engineering. My handy formulation of the Communist Party is that it is a Leninist Technocracy with Grand Opera Characteristics — practical until it collapses into the preposterous.

America, by contrast, is the lawyerly society. Elite law schools, now and in the past, fashion the easiest path for the ambitions to step into the top ranks of the American government. The dominance of lawyers in the American elite has helped transmute the United States into a litigious vetocracy. I believe that America cannot remain a great power if it is so committed to a system that works well mostly for the wealthy and well-connected.


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Author Bio per Amazon.com

I’m a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab. Previously, I was a fellow at the Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, and before that, I covered technology at Gavekal Dragonomics. For the better part of a decade, I’ve been trying to figure out China’s technology capabilities while I lived in Hong Kong, Beijing, and then Shanghai. In addition to my annual letters, my essays have appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Financial Times, New York Magazine, Bloomberg Opinion, and The Atlantic.


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Book Review Excerpts per Amazon.com

"Breakneck reads as a warning. The book’s title seems to refer to China’s speedy growth. But it might also apply to the US; after all, it’s what can happen when you slip."
― Christopher Beam, Bloomberg

"[Wang] deftly mixes data-rich analysis with vivid personal anecdotes and punchy opinions. His book is both a fascinating exploration of China’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as a searing critique of how a self-harming American leadership could lose the technological arms race to its rival. "
― John Thornhill, Financial Times

"A landmark work. . . Wang’s writing is lucid, his insights are original, and his ability to bridge empirical observation with philosophical reflection makes this book essential reading for anyone concerned with the strategic implications of China’s rise."
― Jean-Thomas Nicole, The Cipher Brief

"If you want to know what is driving today's China or America, Chinese-Canadian analyst Dan Wang's new book is an indispensable guide. Wang shows that the world’s most urgent and challenging twenty-first-century task may be to forge a synthesis of the best of China and America, while avoiding the worst of each."
― J. Bradford DeLong, Project Syndicate

"An illuminating account of China’s dizzying rise and its deepening pathologies."
― Chris Miller, author of Chip War

"The best recent book on China, on China and America, and arguably the best book of the year flat out. It is marvelously written and brilliantly understands the dilemmas of our modern world."
― Tyler Cowen

"Dan Wang is an indispensable voice on China issues because he has the rarest combination of precious resources: deep knowledge and unflinching judgment. Half of his mind runs on philosophy; the other half runs on engineering. If Dan did not already exist, we would need to invent him for precisely this day and age."
― Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition

"Dan Wang is able to illuminate China like no one else, and his annual letters have long been mandatory reading in Silicon Valley. Breakneck expands this analysis and delivers a simultaneously riveting and revelatory account of one of the most important topics of our time."
― Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe

"Simply one of the best China writers out there. . . an incredibly thoughtful, holistic and engaging work on one of the biggest stories of our time."
― Tracy Alloway, co-host of Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast

"In analyzing China, Wang’s vivid, often autobiographical reporting delivers."
― City Journal

"A timely meditation on technology and governance―and a rollicking read, to boot."
― Eva Dou, author of House of Huawei

"A must-read book on the intense competition between the United States and China for global leadership in the twenty-first century."
― Julian Gewirtz, former White House Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs and author of Never Turn Back

"A brilliant book about how China got ahead, how the United States stagnated, and the challenges that both will face in the future."
― Odd Arne Westad, professor of history at Yale University and co-author of The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform

"Dan Wang comes bearing an uncomfortable truth that Americans need to hear: China builds, while America argues. And if we don't change that situation, and learn how to build things again, China is going to win the next century."
― Noah Smith, writer at Noahpinion

"Dan Wang is one of the deepest thinkers and most careful observers of the world that I know. His letters are extremely thought-provoking and worth the read."
― Ben Thompson, founder of Stratechery

"China outpaces and outproduces the United States in a growing number of high-tech fields. With his trademark mix of personal observation and objective analysis, Dan Wang explains not only what is happening, but why. The result is a tour de force essential for policymakers, academics, investors and entrepreneurs."
― Rush Doshi, assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University and C.V. Starr senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations